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Mother Files Lawsuit Against Daycare Center, Alleges Abuse

Letricia Walker says her son's leg was broken at her former day care center. (CBS)

CHICAGO (CBS) — The sign outside a child day care center on Chicago’s West Side says: “Where all children are loved.”

But a Chicago mother says her son was abused and seriously injured while he was left there.

CBS2’s Mike Parker reports that she’s suing for damages.

“My son needs some type of justice,” Letricia Walker says.

In February of 2010, her son, Jeremy Brown, was just five months old. Walker says she bundled him up and dropped him off at the Learning to Love Child Care Center while she went to work.

At that moment, Walker says, “He was perfect, friendly, laughing.”

But later in the day the center’s operator called Walker and told her that the boy was crying and “fussy,” she says.

His mother says she picked him up and took him home, then became concerned about his condition. She took him to the emergency room at West Suburban Hospital in Oak Park. There, doctors found that Jeremy’s femur, his thigh bone, had a twisted fracture.

The Department of Children and Family Services tells CBS2 its investigation concluded that somebody had abused the boy.

“A five-month-old can never do anything to justify these kind of injuries,” Walker’s attorney, Rajesh Kanur, says.

Jeremy’s mother believes the center’s operator is responsible.

But that operator, Lommie Matthews-Hicks, says she believes the boy was hurt before he was dropped off and says that she has been “exonerated” by DCFS.

DCFS is saying that it did not technically exonerate the operator. The agency says there was no credible evidence to implicate her or anyone else. The agency says only that there was an “unknown perpetrator.”